Oracle Linux on SPARC

Last week there were news about Linux on SPARC. Oracle announced their Oracle Linux 6.7 as GA with the Oracle Enterprise Unbreakable Linux Kernel for SPARC T5 and T7 based servers.

This release supports the build in SPARC features like secure memory, the DAX engines and the crypto co processers on Oracle’s own CPUs. You could install it bare metal or in an OVM / LDOM guest. It also comes with support for the LDOM manager so you could use it as a primary domain.

I gave it try on my old T2 server but the installation failed installing grub on that old platform. I tried to manually install grub2 but got a lot of errors with the sun labed vdisk.

So I tried it on a T7-2 server in a LDOM and there everything worked fine.

I am not really sure why Oracle released “such an old version”. No UEK 3 or 4, just the 2.6, but at least the latest 2.6.39… I am running a beta SPARC linux from Oracle which was avaiable since 2015 and within this release you get 4.1. But the system uses silo (a SPARC lilo boot loader) not grub2 like OL 6.7 for SPARC.